Abstract
Places and cities are saturated with signification, and are reduced to this signification. Places and cities are, in the person’s mind, compilations of stories and memories. Personal identity in places and cities must be recognized and honored. The world is made of cultures at different stages of growth, and history and this pluralism is not marginal, but an essential fact of life. These differences should be protected and nurtured. Differance, for Derrida, means not only to differ but also to defer the meaning of anything, endlessly, because it is never total or finished. This open process of meaning is an obvious fact of cultures since they are historical and changing. It is important thus to nurture plurality and to design the most local contextual counterpoint.
With this in mind, diagrams can be modes of becoming an emergence of difference. For Derrida, a diagram subverts the dominant oppositions and hierarchies currently constitutive of the discourse.
Architecture is a discursive-material field of cultural-political plasticity. Diagrams can account for the effects of culture on both how we use our senses to understand spatial constructs, and the contents of the memory base used for comparison. There is considerable interaction between perception and culture, and diagrams can be an urban mosaic of perception.
Diagrams can describe the power relationships in the city and begin to map their urban spatial and architectural implications. The diagram could be used as a device that blurs the distinction between subject and object, bringing forth tensions of looking at and looking through, of being in and being out. According to Deleuze, “a diagram is no longer an auditory or visual archive, but a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field, and is an abstract machine.”
The focus of this thesis will be to investigate the ways in which diagrams can operate as an abstract machine, describe the power relationships, and map the political, social, cultural, topological contexts of a city. It will look at case studies to find the types and functions of diagrams implemented by architects, and look at the theoretical and historical basis of diagrams in architecture.
The thesis functions as a research report outlining and visualizing the attributes of diagrams utilized by a selected number of prominent architects, and as a public website, containing the diagrams that exhibit the narrative of the city of Buffalo. The public access to the website containing the visual narratives and diagrams of the city of Buffalo will encourage designers to nurture plurality and to design the most local contextual counterpoint.
This thesis offers speculative thinking through a conscious engagement with the normative practices of everyday life in the contemporary city. This design research brings to light the broad spectrum of economic, political, and cultural issues in Buffalo, and contributes information to the ongoing dilemma for architectural practice(s) – of how it views itself in relation to the context it operates in.
- Why is ethnographic research important for the design process in architecture?
- How can researching the most “digestible” communication design for architecture benefit the user experience?
- Why are diagrams the prevailing mode of communicating research within the design process for architects, and when it acts as an abstract machine, what can it achieve for it’s users?
Last updated: 09/29
